You probably know by now that workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee have voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers.
After two losses at the same plant, the UAW has organized its first foreign-owned plant in the South and a Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama may quickly become the second.
“I think it’s going to start a chain reaction,” Shawn Fain, the UAW’s president said Friday. “Once we show the world that it is possible, I think it’s going to open the door for thousands of other workers, tens of thousands of other workers to join in and to get justice on the job.”
Fain has quickly become one of the most dynamic labor leaders in American history. And we haven’t had one of those in a while.
He and the UAW are seizing on an economy enjoying near full employment along with public investment in manufacturing at levels America hasn’t seen in more than half a century.
And Republicans are terrified. Before the vote on Friday, GOP governors from six Southern states blasted the UAW for being against “the values we live by.”
This appeal to “tradition” in the South is barely coded. It speaks to the “racial bribe” that helped make slavery work and provided the lifeblood of Jim Crow.
“Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privilege to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves,” as The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander explained.
This bribe purposely divided Black and white workers, creating perpetual friction where an alliance would have served both. That bribe persists today in the divide we see between red states and blue states. Red states purposely offer fewer services, worse health care and generally poorer schools but what you get in exchange is that bribe that keeps the wedge alive.
You may not get expanded Medicaid and that may close dozens of rural hospitals but we’re going to terrorize trans kids for you. We’ll make it harder for Black people to vote. You can count on us to make sure any poor person capable of giving birth lives in a persistent state of terror.
The video above exposes the hollowness of that bribe and the power of a multi-racial coalition who unites to demand the compensation, benefits, and security they deserve.
And it also exposes the hollowness of the MAGA movement.
Whenever Republicans destroy their brand by implementing their failed policies and purposely incompetent style of governing, they have a simple trick.
They pretend that they’re not Republicans.
In 2016, MAGA was described as something new in the Republican Party. Trump pretended to be against cuts to the safety net and flirted with the idea of cutting taxes. Because this supposedly wasn’t just Paul Ryan’s GOP serving up America on a platter to billionaires, this was about rebuilding America and trade and manufacturing and other things workers like!
Of course, who Trump, whose entire Republican political career was born from suggesting Barack Obama faked his own birth and wasn’t a real American. This made him a hero of another movement that was pretending Republicans weren't Republicans -- the Tea Party.
Trump’s support is uniquely tied to animus toward minority groups and the white people who align with those groups. An extensive study found that those who had those opinions in 2011, Tea Partiers, almost invariably became part of MAGA.
Very obviously, MAGA is mostly about putting people in their place – trans people, pregnant people, immigrants (you know which kind), Obama people. The policies have been revealed as just as billionaire-fluffing as those of Paul Ryan, who was the architect of the tax cuts that were Trump’s only significant legislative win. And the social policies are literally Christian nationalism.
It’s all about clawing back power white males feel they deserve, no matter how they rebrand it. It’s all about that bribe. But when you get around these constructed and enforced divisions, something magical happens.
It’s the kind of thing that has terrified Southern aristocrats for centuries. And it’s the kind of thing that terrifies Donald Trump as he sits in a courtroom and is forced to comply with a Rule of Law that, at its best, doesn’t recognize the power of that bribe.
This victory in Chattanooga was foremost a victory for these workers and their families. And it’s historic for the UAW. But it’s also a victory for those workers’ neighbors, because we know unions improve the life of all workers. And it’s fundamentally a victory for the people, for democracy, for the hope that the malignant forces that seek to divide us for massive profits will not win again.
Thanks to the great Tennessee Holler for making this video.
This is what that terrifies Republicans most